In this episode, we are joined by Barry Hess, James Adam, and Matthew Lettini from the Good Enough team to discuss their journey in creating a self-sustaining business built around meaningful, user-focused software. We explore the inception of their company and their latest product, Jelly—a shared inbox for teams. We dive into their experimental approach to business, their year of experimentation known internally as "Cosmic Maelstrom," the rollout of other products like their blogging software, Pika, and the decision to offer free tools. The team shares their insights into maintaining a human touch in customer support, navigating marketing challenges, and the value of brainstorming unconventional ideas. Through it all, they emphasize the importance of community, sustainability, and creating software that should exist in the world to make a meaningful impact.

Links:
Good Enough
Jelly
Pika
All Products

Good Enough Socials:
Newsletter
Mastodon
Bluesky
Threads
X

James
Matthew
Barry

In this episode, we're excited to introduce our guest, Becky Searls. We recently met Becky at Rails World and learned about her business, Better with Becky—a fitness training program focused on people with a growth mindset. Over the past year, she worked with her husband Justin to build her first product, Build with Becky, a personalized workout program and fitness app built in Rails, which launched publicly during the conference! We chat with Becky about her professional journey starting as a K-12 educator, becoming a fitness instructor, building her own business, and now moving into the product owner role to develop a custom app.

More About Becky

Becky Searls is definitely not another influencer, and she’s more than a personal trainer. Her experience in education, embrace of evidence-based research, and personable judgment-free approach sets her apart in an industry famous for baseless hype and scammy practices.

Spending over a decade as an accomplished foreign language teacher, Becky truly has the heart of an educator. When she learns something important, her first thought is always how to best share it with others. She also knows life's greatest lessons are found outside of the classroom. So as she dives deeper into research papers spanning health, fitness, nutrition, and psychology, she can’t imagine keeping all the useful things she discovers to herself.

That's what Better with Becky is: the place she translates cutting-edge science into practical tools and everyday advice for the rest of us.

That may explain why, as her debut product, Build with Becky doesn't look like other exercise programs. Yes, it will give you a great workout. But you won't believe how much you'll learn along the way, without even realizing it. And yes, you'll probably see progress toward your fitness goals. But don't be surprised if you also gain deeper insights that connect with other parts of your life. That's just part of what you get with Becky!

Training and certifications include:

 
    • Master of Arts, Education (The Ohio State University)
    • National Strength and Conditioning Association Certified Personal Trainer (NSCA-CPT)
    • Mindfulness-Based Behavior Change Facilitator
    • Precision Nutrition Level 1 Certified Coach (PN-L1)
    • USA Weightlifting Level 1 Certified Coach (USAW-L1)
    • Pain-free performance specialist (National Academy of Sports Medicine) 

Relevant Links

Better with Becky

Beckygram (which syndicates her Instagram)
Becky's YouTube
The Empowered Programmer (Justin's Rails World talk, featuring Build with Becky)

In this episode, Jess and Jeremy chat about leveling up professionally, the importance of community and personal growth, and the challenges of starting new things. Jess shares several things that have inspired him recently, and Jeremy gives an update on Liminal and shares some ideas he has around discoverability challenges in the Rails ecosystem.

Referenced

• Bunch of Guys video clip
• Raise your standards video clip
• “Start from wherever you are and with whatever you’ve got.” - Jim Rohn
• Liminal forum app

In this episode, Justin Searls (open source author, speaker, and co-founder of Test Double) joins us in-person at Rails World to talk about his career, speaking, consulting, the One Person Framework, and building a web application for his wife's fitness business, Better with Becky.

Follow Justin
Website
Twitter
Mastodon
LinkedIn

Relevant Links
The Empowered Programmer talk
Test Double
Breaking Change podcast
Fred Brooks
RubyKaigi
The One Person Framework

On Day 2 of Rails World, Jess and Jeremy join with Drew Bragg of Code and the Coding Coders Who Code It and Adrian Marin and Yaro Shmarov  of the Friendly Show to chat about the conference. Enjoy!

In this crossover episode, Jeremy and Jess join up with Chris & Jason from Remote Ruby podcast to discuss Ruby programming, indie development, and the challenges of building and maintaining software as solo developers. We dive into the origins of Indie Rails, share our individual career journeys, and explore Jeremy's project, Liminal, which aims to replace traditional forums and Slack with a more modern solution. The group reflects on the frustrations with current platforms, their experiences with indie development, and the importance of marketing alongside coding. They also compare Rails and Laravel, talk about the "one-person framework" concept, and the challenges in maintaining open-source libraries. Throughout the conversation, they emphasize the value of transparency in product development and the need for community support. They wrap up with thoughts on the importance of events like Rails Hackathons and the continued evolution of Rails for solo developers. Hit download now to hear more!

Justin Duke is the founder of Buttondown, an email platform with first-class Markdown support. Justin is also a partner at Third South Capital, where he and his partners buy and grow existing software products. We chat about his background in marketing and software development, bootstrapping Buttondown while working at Stripe, the Buttondown tech stack (Django, a cousin of Rails and Vue), and his latest endeavors with Third South.

Justin
Website
Twitter

Buttondown
Website
Twitter
Changelog
Stack
Open Source

Third South Capital
Website
Twitter

Relevant Links
Markdoc
babelmark
Curtailing the free plan
Work on what matters

Landon Gray is a Rubyist, speaker, strategic advisor, and AI engineer. In May, he left Test Double to found Identus Consulting, where he helps companies with generative AI and machine learning. We chat about his love for consulting, how he got into AI, and how he's working with clients these days, using a blend of technical and project management skills.

Follow Landon
Twitter
LinkedIn
Ruby AI Twitter
Identus Consulting
Curious Centroid
Forecasting the future: Intro to Machine Learning for weather prediction in Native Ruby

Relevant Links
Test Double
Great Learning
Claude
Jeremy Howard
Torch.rb
Transformers.rb
Pandas
Jupyter

Our guest will be no stranger to most of our listeners. He’s been around the Ruby community for many years. He’s spoken at conferences, hosted conferences, hosts a "pretty good" podcast, author of courses, a staff engineer at Podia and more recently the co-founder of a successful SaaS: Job Boardly. Enjoy the show with Jason Charnes!

Related Links
Personal Website

X

Job Boardly
Podia
Remote Ruby

In this episode, we are thrilled to host Nate Berkopec, a renowned author, speaker, trainer, and consultant. Nate runs Speedshop, his Rails performance consultancy, and is the author of "The Complete Guide to Rails Performance." He also maintains Puma, the most popular Ruby web server, and somehow finds time to be an avid cyclist. Nate's journey from a junior Rails developer to a leading performance expert is nothing short of inspiring. Join us as we dive into his story, insights, and expertise.

Links:

• X
• Personal Website
• SpeedShop
• The Rails Performance Workshop. A four-week program that makes your Rails app faster and more scalable. Attended by over 500 developers so far. Team and solo editions.
• The Complete Guide to Rails Performance, an in-depth 370 page reference manual on making Rails apps faster.
• Sidekiq in Practice, a workshop for teaching you how to scale Sidekiq from 0 to 10,000 jobs per second.
• The Ruby on Rails Performance Apocrypha, a short book about the ins and outs of scaling Rails
• Speedshop Blog, the number one Ruby on Rails performance blog on the 'net.
• The Speedshop Newsletter, a weekly email newsletter that talks about issues surrounding optimizing and scaling Ruby web applications.